The Supporter Journey conference 2018

Delivering the best donor experience is a challenge faced by many charities — especially in a multi-channel environment, where the number of touch points and supporter expectations are both rising rapidly. While the commercial sector can invest to embrace these changes, charities must be more creative and imaginative, to ensure that the level of satisfaction, commitment and engagement of all donors is the best that it can be.

When done well, a positive donor experience will cement a lifetime of support from the donor and consequently generate long-term fundraising success. However when done badly, it can prove detrimental to the relationship and result in low commitment and loyalty.

This year’s Supporter Journey conference will bring together speakers, from both within and outside of the sector, who will speak candidly about their supporter care processes and the successes and challenges they’ve overcome on their journey. From strategic to cultural changes and everything in between, this conference will help you deliver the best experiences for your donors.

09.30

Opening remarks from the Chair

Harpreet Kondel, Fundraising Specialist

09.40

Mindful Monsters – Laying the foundations at the start of the journey

Over-reliant on face-to-face as a channel to recruit regular donors and experiencing declining ROI, Scope needed to diversify and attract new regular givers at scale cost-efficiently. A genuinely audience-led approach was the only way to create a winning strategy.

An audience-led regular giving product campaign provided new audiences with new reasons to engage long term. Insight drove the strategy: mums wanted to build children’s emotional resilience and life skills, and Mindful Monsters was developed.

For £7.50 each month, supporters receive seven activity cards using monster characters to address challenges through play and creativity, plus tips and advice to maximise impact. Twelve months of mindful activities to build children’s life skills and create family moments.

Using digital channels to take the product to market Scope has now recruited thousands of new highly engaged supporters at a record breaking cost.

When one of your programme staff arranges for a gift to be hand-delivered half way across the world, you know you’ve created a culture that values donors. But how?

This session is for fundraisers who want to build a donor-centric culture that says thank you to your supporters with originality, urgency and warmth.

Robin Peake, Head of Fundraising and Communications, Innovista

10.50

Insights from 40 supporter journeys - the good, the bad, the ugly…

Over the past year the JGA Secret Giver scheme has tracked, assessed and analysed every single engagement and communication with over 40 different charities. Our Secret Givers have donated, campaigned, purchased, complained and opted in or out, and we have worked alongside them to understand exactly how each Supporter Journey has affected their understanding, knowledge and commitment to the charities they are supporting. We will share some of the key findings, insights and case study examples to help you compare, contrast, refine and improve your own donors’ Supporter Journey.

Three Key Takeaways:

(1) Evidence based overview of 40 supporter journeys with comprehensive benchmarking statistics by cause and size.

(2) Key insights into different approaches to Supporter Journeys

(3) Leading charity case study into how to apply benchmarking and insights for practical improvements to supporter journey development

John Grain, Director, Director, John Grain Associates Ltd

11.30

Coffee and networking

11.50

Segmentation, segue… and segway

A session that demonstrates how segmentation can help achieve smooth transitions across multiple supporter journeys. Demonstrating how supporters are neither held in rigid segments nor existing in isolation of one another. Showing a way to channel the potential of each and every supporter – irrespective of value – and in doing so building quality relationships that are both fluid and flexible through an integrated approach.

Communicating with supporters in the right way, and at the right place and time, is quite a challenge for charity marketers. Chatbot innovation can provide donors with a much smoother experience online. It also has the massive potential to create a new dimension through which an audience can engage with and discover more about a charity and its cause. One outstanding examples of this is WaterAid’s ‘Talk to Sellu.’ Through this, supporters encounter Sellu and his community, deep in the Sierra Leone jungle where there is no clean water.

Come and hear about how Sellu has taken supporters on a different kind of journey and how WaterAid has benefitted from the relationship.

Daniel Gray, Digital Engagement Manager, WaterAid

13.10

Lunch break

13.55

Embedding supporter feedback in to new supporter journeys

The Prince’s Trust Philanthropy team have created a culture where their work with young people is the number one focus for themselves and their donors. “Case studies” are now replaced by personal stories, standard “thank you” letters are replaced by personalised, innovative, meaningful moments, and rather than updating donors on The Trust’s work, both fundraisers and donors go together to immerse themselves in it first-hand. The team has listened to their donors, involved them in their fundraising and created a personalised approach which has delivered huge growth in income consistently over the past three years.

As our need to be more community-centric continues to grow, and our reach is stretched more than ever before, fundraisers need to get on board with technology to lead, inspire and encourage.

Find out how to use Facebook, without a budget, to work for your charity within the community. Sharing hints and tips about how it has worked locally, and practically to recruit, engage, and build lifelong supporter value.

Amy Petterson, Community Fundraising Relationship Manager, Guide Dogs

15.10

Coffee break and networking

15.30

The Donor Experience: how to deepen supporter loyalty

In this session, Richard and Roger from the Donor Experience Project, as part of their work with fundraisers to improve the experience of donors, will present a different perspective on journeys. To them, a journey is not a sequence of communications or transactions, but rather an ongoing process to deepen supporter loyalty.

Their mission is to help all charities to measure 'the experience' and to take steps to improve it. Come and hear about how to achieve this through a series of simple steps, supported with some examples and data.

Richard Spencer, Director, Promoderation

Roger Lawson, Roger Lawson Consulting

16.10

Making the journey a better experience: lessons from the corporate world

Too often supporter journey planning focuses on the process involved. We produce fantastic looking journeys, but then forget about the content of supporter touch points and interactions. The result? Boring comms that don’t improve supporter satisfaction, loyalty and commitment.

How do you stop your journeys from becoming redundant dead-ends?

This session will share examples from the best customer experience companies in the world. We’ll reveal some of their secrets and show how you can use the ideas to improve your own supporter journeys and experience.

Craig Linton, Owner and Lead Consultant, Fundraising Detective

16.50

Closing remarks from the Chair

Harpreet Kondel, Fundraising Specialist

17.00

Event close

ASSOCIATE SPONSORS

PRICES

IoF Individual member/those working at an IoF Organisational member: £210

Never been an IoF member? Are you working for a charity/not-for-profit organisation?

Book the conference AND get a year’s Individual membership benefits: £300